Woman who lost dad to cancer is helping other bereaved children

ST. GEORGE — When Lilliana Rogers was 16 years old, she stood in the Huntsman Cancer Research Center in Salt Lake City, watching her dad stare out the window.

"I remember I asked him what he was looking at out there and he looked over at me and he said, 'You never know how the sun shines, how the wind blows and how the birds sing until you're dying,'" she recalled.

Rogers is now a prevention specialist at Southwest Behavioral Health Center in St. George, primarily helping children cope with grief after the loss of a caregiver or sibling.

As a teenager, however, all she knew was the pain of losing her dad to cancer.

"I'm from Kanab, which is a rural community, and we had to travel to Salt Lake for my father's medical care," she recalled. "During his treatment and after his passing, we didn't have any resources and I experienced a lot of negative outcomes from that and so did my sister."

Rogers recalled a steep decline in her mental health, but at the time, she didn't have a name for it. All she knew was that she wanted the pain to go away. She turned to alcohol and self-harm and admits to having attempted suicide.

"When I was going through this, I didn't know all of the research," she said. "I was just a grieving kid at the time, and I was trying to navigate this huge loss that totally turned my world upside down.

"I had to try to go to school and be a normal kid and try to get my license and do all the things that normal kids do and I just didn't know how to exist in both worlds. I didn't know how to keep going in the world that's still turning, when my world felt like it just completely stopped."

At the age of 18, Rogers recalled a moment when she heard her dad's voice, which took her back to the memory of seeing him look out the window. That jog in memory, she said, changed her.

"At that moment, I was like, 'Oh, dad. You're not dying. Don't say that,'" she recalled. "Looking back, I know he was just embracing himself in a beautiful moment of life that we didn't know was near the end.

"His voice just rang through my head, and it was like somebody snapped their fingers, and I woke up, and I was like, 'What am I doing? I need to live my life. I'm going to wake up one day, and it's going to be done, and I don't want to wait until I'm dying and regret every decision I made. I need to do something more.'"

Helping others

That year, she started attending Dixie State University, which is now Utah Tech University, with the intent to learn the tools to help grieving children like her. She studied psychology and communications, graduating in 2023.

She said that through her time there, and now as a prevention specialist, she's learned about different things that contribute to childhood trauma. These things are known in the mental health world as adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, and one listed was losing a parent, guardian or sibling.

"One of the big things we talk about in prevention is risk and protective factors and how that aligns with adverse childhood experiences," she said. "I feel like we talk a lot about the others, but we don't talk about the impact of a child losing a parent. As I did research, I found that the death of a parent is a traumatic event that places children at a significantly higher risk for other traumatic experiences and can lead to things like alcohol abuse and suicide ideation as well as chronic health issues."

She also learned that although she felt so alone in her own grief, there were many others out there just like her.

In fact, according to the Child Bereavement Estimated Model, 1 in 11 children in the U.S. will experience the death of a parent or sibling by age 18. In Utah, that number is slightly lower, but not by much. CBEM found that 1 in 15 children under the age of 18 in Utah will lose a parent or sibling.

"I wanted to do something that would target not only the youth, but the parents as well because I think helping the family as a whole is most important," she added. "You can teach a child a skill, but if they don't have family that's willing to support those skills, it can't always be the most beneficial. This is where the Good Grief Project came about."

Earlier this year, Rogers, with support from Southwest Behavioral Health Center and many local organizations, launched a free program to help bereaved children and their families. It's a five-week program for parents, and a six-week program for children.

"We promote health and wellbeing, setting clear family standards and expectations, managing family conflict and anger in a positive way, and help children and the family grieve," she said. "We emphasize how grief changes the family dynamic and teach ways to incorporate grief into the family. We teach skills that are evidence-based and effective."

The second session of the program started earlier this week, and she said there are still openings, and says those interested can sign up through this Google Doc. She also said that while putting together the program, she drew from her own loss and did everything she could to "reduce barriers" so that all who need it can come.

"We know that when you're grieving, finances can be really hard," she said. "When my dad got sick, I had to start working to help afford his treatments and food for travel. I had to start working at 15.

"Every parent session, we provide a $50 gift card as a childcare stipend," she said. "If they don't need a babysitter, we wanted them to utilize that how they choose, if they want to use it for gas to be able to come to the program."

They also provide dinner for parents and snacks for the kids, as well as a $20 meal card for parents to pick up dinner on the way home so they "don't have to worry about making dinner when they get home."

'You know what, Dad? I'm doing it'

As Rogers works with children and families navigating grief in a productive way, she said she thinks about her dad and the version of herself that didn't know how to grieve.

"When I was going through my grief, it felt so isolated and so alone," she said. "To create a space where people can grieve as a community and as a family has been so beautiful. I'm just so happy that I could use my experience and my pain to help other people rather than have it hurt somebody or destroy myself.

"It makes me feel like, 'You know what, Dad? I'm doing it. I'm doing it for us and I'm helping other people in your name so that no other kid has to grieve alone."

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